Flamboyance by Jack Parlett review ā a serious study of the spectacular
What does it mean to push the boat out, and can peacocking be more than just a beautiful gesture? A friendās mother once told me
What does it mean to push the boat out, and can peacocking be more than just a beautiful gesture? A friendās mother once told me that for a couple of years in the 1980s ā as the Conservatives were waging war on the miners and she spent late nights at Marxist-feminist reading groups ā she wore an almost daily uniform of jeans and a white T-shirt. On her wedding day she broke with habit and put on a dress she had bought, at great expense to her, that was fun, sexy and, although she didnāt use this word, flamboyant.
The next week at the school she taught in she saw a colleague wearing it. āNice dress,ā she said. āItās OK for work,ā her colleague replied, ābut I wouldnāt wear it out.ā I found myself recalling this anecdote as I read Jack Parlettās memoir-cum-cultural history of our attempts to push the boat out. To make any effort is to risk embarrassment, to be seen either as ridiculous or hopelessly naive. One way to avoid those charges is to use playful or cynical irony.
Parlett finds examples of this in Oscar Wilde and what the cultural critic Susan Sontag once described as camp, a worldview obsessed with artifice and performance. Although Flamboyance is not a polemic, itās clear that its author sees something lacking in these efforts at self-fashioning. The book is couched as an alternative; Parlett presents flamboyance as a model for how to live a life that not only āburns with a resistant energyā but āputs politics back into the pictureā.
In practice, this means that he has little patience for the notion of art for artās sake; he insists, for example, that there is no making sense of flamenco without understanding the history of fascism in Spain. Continue reading...
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